“She Does Not Live Here”

I lived my childhood in a Finnish town Tornio which forms a twin-city with Swedish town Haaparanta. Although the cities were located in different countries, it was possible to make phone calls without adding the country code. I used to call weekly to my grandmother who was living in a nursing home in Haaparanta. I had her number saved on my phone.

I moved to Southern Finland to study and I wanted to call her from my new apartment. I selected her number on my phone and somebody answered something like : “nursing home”. I asked if she could take the phone to my grandma, but she said there was not anybody with that name living in the nursing home. I knew that in grandma’s place the patients sometimes answer the phone and their memory can be a bit weak. I insisted very strongly that she has to be there and demanded to get her on phone. The voice on the other end kept saying: “she does not live here.”

At last I could figure out what had happened: I had saved the number on my phone without the country code, and called to a wrong number. What is surprising is that the number had connected me to some other nursing home, in Finland.